


Que Sera, Sera

by sugarlessgum



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: 2k stream of consciousness projecting my own experience as a queer kid from a midwestern family, Character Study, Destiny, Welters Challenge 2019, that veers wildly into an au in the final act
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 06:35:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18823105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarlessgum/pseuds/sugarlessgum
Summary: Destiny is bullshit. That’s something Eliot convinced himself of years ago, when all common sense told him his destiny would never take him out of Bumfuck, Indiana. But then destiny throws him a curveball and makes him High King of Nightmare Narnia. Quentin sets the crown on his head and Eliot feels like he can breathe for the first time in twenty-four years.





	Que Sera, Sera

_“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”_ _  
_ _\- Ralph Waldo Emerson_

 

Eliot is fourteen when he makes Logan Kinnear walk in front of a bus. It’s the final nail in the coffin of what he’s always known: he will never be normal. As if he needed another reason to stand out, he can now add “telepathic freak” to the list. He’s just one bad prom away from going full Carrie.

He should probably be more surprised by this development but a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like his dad says, _Of course this happened. Did he expect any different?_ Maybe it’s the shock.

He watches them load Logan’s body into the back of the ambulance and says goodbye to any hope he had of belonging anywhere.

 

He has three older brothers. Three shining examples of the man he’s supposed to grow into. They drink Schlitz and play three sports each and look at Eliot with pity in their eyes. They wake up early on weekends to go fishing with dad. They go on hunting trips and revel in the sportsmanship.

Eliot goes hunting exactly once when he's twelve. The gun feels as heavy in his hands as the world on Atlas’ shoulder. At the first sight of a deer, he panics and shoots a tree. The way his brothers laugh is the second worst experience he’s had up to this point. The worst is the way his dad looks at him when they get back to the truck. Like he's broken.

 

Eliot hates the farm and he hates Indiana. Every day he wakes up is more suffocating than the last.

He tries, for a long time. He tries to make it work. He helps on the farm. He stops signing up for the school play every spring. He tries out for the football team freshman year instead. He helps his classmates beat the shit out of the only person who has ever accepted him.

None of it ever works. Eventually he gives in, looks for an escape. Dutiful son and hardworking farm boy weren’t working for him, so he starts crafting a new persona. He sneaks out at night and gets drunk in strangers’ basements. He hides fashion magazines under his mattress like contraband. He holds cigarettes between his fingers and chokes on the exhaust. He wills himself to stop caring, about anything. Anyone.

His first attempts are clumsy. Embarrassing. He feels like an imposter. But there’s a tiny, skittish part of him that feels overwhelmingly _right_ with each development. He chases that feeling.

He works away at this secret identity slowly and carefully. The world’s most pathetic superhero. Some days, he gets angry with himself. The voice from the day of the bus accident comes back, asking, _Why do you always have to make everything difficult? Why can’t you just be happy with what you’ve got? What makes you think you deserve any better than this town?_

He wishes bitterly that everyone else were as miserable as him. At least then he could understand why he's so dissatisfied. But they're all happy. While Eliot suffocates under the constraints of their small town, his family thrives in it. His brothers have friends and join clubs and win football games. They go out Friday nights to set off fireworks at the lake with the neighbor’s kids. They bring home girlfriends for their mom to dote on.

His mom is sweet, kind, quick to smile. She spends mornings helping on the farm and afternoons in the kitchen. The kind of picture perfect, Norman Rockwell housewife fantasy Eliot finds nauseating. He watches her sometimes, looking for the seams in her mask, but there are none.

Even his dad—a rough, angry, unemotional man—is happy with his life. The nearest Eliot ever sees him come to smiling is when he sits down for dinner after a long day in the fields, radiating a quiet satisfaction. And, for reasons he will never understand, his parents are deeply in love with each other. It’s not uncommon to find them slow dancing in their small kitchen, Doris Day playing on the radio, lost in their own world.

Eliot wonders what kind of fucked up fate it is that someone like his dad could find the love of his life when Eliot feels like he’ll never shake the bone-deep loneliness that’s followed him since childhood.

 

His mom used to read them stories every night before bed. She loved fantasy, was the one who introduced Eliot to the concept of magic. And he loved the brief escape from Indiana he found in their pages. She reads him the _Fillory and Further_ series when he’s young enough that he forgets most of the details later in life (much later, when they become painfully, laughably relevant) but somehow he never forgot Chatwin’s Torrent. The magic spring that healed Rupert’s leg. Even as a child, he was obsessed with the idea that somewhere, something existed that could find what was broken in you and heal it.

Eliot keeps is eyes trained on the floor of the locker room and wonders if the spring could fix this too.

 

He gets better at being himself. Eventually, he slides into a silk button down shirt and it doesn’t feel like a child playing dress up anymore. He’s witty and charming and elegant and he can almost pretend that this is enough to mean he’s happy.

And he’s magic. He finds a school that teaches him how to use it for something beautiful, something outside of death and spite.

He meets Margo Hanson, the most magnificent person he’s ever known and quite probably his soulmate. They throw parties and seduce half the campus and slowly conquer Brakebills side by side. He rests his head in her lap and the block of ice cold loneliness in his heart melts away with each second.

But even among the dazzling wizardry of Brakebills, he can’t quite escape the specter of his past. It creeps up on him on quiet nights. He tries to drown it out with drugs and sex and parties, but it always comes back with a vengeance.

“Sometimes it feels like I’ll never escape that town,” he confesses during the Trials. He can’t look Margo in the eye as he says it. “Destined for cow shit and soybeans. Just like Daddy always wanted.” He barely notices the ropes falling from his wrists.

 

Eliot cut ties with romanticism at an early age. He accepts that it will never be in the cards for him. He laughs at the couples who get starry-eyed and stupid over each other just to fuck everything up and bawl their eyes out a month later. It's much better to remain unattached. He keeps a rotating door of suitors, never letting any of them stick long enough to hurt when they go.

Which is why he aggressively shuts down the rom-com narration in his head cooing about  _fate_ when his Exact Type comes stumbling out of the hedges and into his life.

Eliot tells himself his interest is no different than any of his other first-year boys, here today gone tomorrow. Pretends the adolescent infatuation blooming in his chest is just excitement for a new chase. He’ll be bored in a week. He isn’t prepared for the honesty and affection and unabashed excitement that come with Quentin Coldwater. He's spent years conditioning himself to be disaffected and Quentin's brand of openness feels like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. Eliot watches Quentin walk around wide-eyed in awe of magic and feels his armor cracking. He sees Quentin break down at the thought of being expelled and he cuts himself open to make Quentin feel less alone. He brushes Margo off when she tries to imply there’s something deeper to his interest. She of all people should know better than to accuse him of catching feelings.

Somehow, Eliot finds himself opening up to this sad, strange little nerd. Exposing bits of himself he’s spent years hiding under carefully tailored fabric.

“I’m the family disappointment,” he admits one night over a bottle of wine, surprising Quentin as much as himself. “Never quite turned out right. My dad doesn’t know what happened. My brothers are perfect. Someone must have fucked up the recipe with me.”

Quentin always listens with the same expression. Patient, open, cautious. Like one wrong move and he’ll scare Eliot off. But never pity. Eliot feels seen in a way he never was before. It’s fucking terrifying.

 

Destiny is bullshit. That’s something Eliot convinced himself of years ago, when all common sense told him his destiny would never take him out of Bumfuck, Indiana. But then destiny throws him a curveball and makes him High King of Nightmare Narnia. Quentin sets the crown on his head and Eliot feels like he can breathe for the first time in twenty-four years.

Being king feels right in a way nothing else ever has, deep in his bones. So it tracks that it should all fall to shit the second after he's crowned. His friends fuck off back to Brakebills and leave him to deal with agricultural problems of all things. Of course. Then there’s cursed thrones and god shit in the Wellspring and fucking fairies.

When he’s banished, it feels like a death sentence. He fucked up the one thing that has ever made sense in his life. But everything is falling apart and he doesn’t have time to wallow in it.

“You are High King in your blood,” Quentin had said. Well, fuck the crown then. He doesn’t need it. He is still High motherfucking King. He rallies the troops. Drags Julia out of her own self-imposed banishment. Helps Quentin track down Umber. Claws his way back to Fillory to fight for what’s his.

 

It’s a bitter sort of irony, Eliot thinks, that he winds up on a farm again. Although he supposes it’s a bit of a stretch to call the small garden and scattering of chickens they keep outside the cottage a farm.

He spends their first year at the mosaic thinking, _This is it. I was right all along. I never escaped this._ It's a punch to the gut. Except…

Except that he has magic and Quentin and an actual purpose. Except that even on the days where they get frustrated with their task and each other, or they miss their friends so much it feels like it could tear them apart from the inside, he never feels alone the way he did in Indiana.

Except that he has a family. A son.

The first time Arielle passes the baby to him, he’s tempted to thrust Teddy back into her arms and flee into the forest. But then Eliot looks down into his big round eyes and, oh, this is what love at first sight feels like. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Arielle gently wipes the tears from his face.

They settle into a life together, the four of them. And then the three of them. Their time in Fillory becomes more than just laying tiles. They spend it fixing up the cottage, turning the rundown shack they found into a home full of warmth and love and laughter. They watch Teddy grow and send him off into the world to chase his own destiny. He and Q slow dance in the garden to music only they can hear. Eliot’s destiny, it turns out, is pretty fucking great.

But he’s always had a habit of running from his destiny. So when Quentin—sweet, genuine, lovely Quentin—puts his heart on display and asks, “Why the fuck not?” Eliot runs.

 

Eliot wakes up in the Brakebills infirmary, Monster-free and still bleeding from Margo’s axe. The two loves of his life are slouched in chairs at his bedside.

“You two look like shit,” he says. Margo and Quentin look up, awestruck, and in the next second they’re both crowded onto his bed.

There’s a generous amount of tears and hugs and choked out threats about what will happen “if you ever put me through that shit again, you cock.” They fall against each other, exhausted. Margo settles her head on his shoulder and keeps one arm around his chest like a vise. Quentin is more cautious, distant, and it breaks Eliot's heart.

“Come here,” he says, and Quentin does. He curls into Eliot’s side, tucks his face into Eliot’s neck, and stretches out an arm to hold both him and Margo. Eliot wraps an arm around each of them. In the morning, he’ll be brave. But for now, he’ll sleep, surrounded by his family.

 _Destiny,_ he thinks, _is bullshit._ But something in his bones tells him this is the place he’s meant to be, between these two people. And for the first time, destiny doesn’t feel like a death sentence. It feels like home.


End file.
